Just type 'kudzu' on the command line. If I remember right, it'll launch only if it finds something new. If not, it'll just hang for a minute while it looks, then exit if it doesn't find anything new.
However, this is really not your problem. unspawns advice should work fine, by the way, but I think that takes away your ability to do any networking unless you run /etc/init.d/network start every time you wanna browse the net, use telnet, email, etc.
Also, once the system is up, run 'ifconfig' and see what info you can get from that. Are you running DHCP? If so, that may very well be what's slowing it down. If you are running DHCP, it has to wait for your DHCP server to deliver an ip address. If the network and servers are slow, that's gonna cause a short hang. I've never seen a solution to that except to make the network and servers faster
And also, it's not gonna fix the problem, 'cos even if you start networking after you boot, it's still gonna hang. Not the machine's fault, in the case of DHCP, anyway.
Good luck.